Search Results | VOCEDplus, the international tertiary education and research database

Graduate employment in the UK: an application of the Gottschalk-Hansen model

There is an apparent inconsistency in the existing literature on graduate employment in the UK. While analyses of r ... Show more
There is an apparent inconsistency in the existing literature on graduate employment in the UK. While analyses of rates of return to graduates or graduate markups show high returns, suggesting that demand has kept up with a rapidly rising supply of graduates, the literature on over-education suggests that many graduates are unable to find employment in graduate jobs and the proportion over-educated has risen over time. Using a simple supply and demand model applied to UK data that defines graduate jobs in terms of the proportion of graduates and/or the graduate earnings markup within occupations, we find that the employment of graduates in non-graduate jobs has declined over time. Hence, there is no evidence of an over-production of graduates in the UK.
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Authors: Grazier, Suzanne; O'Leary, Nigel C.; Sloane, Peter J.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2008

Geographic subjects: Europe; Great Britain

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Outcomes; Employment; Income ... [+] Show more
Skill-biased transition: the role of markets, institutions, and technological change

This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidenc ... Show more
This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill-favouring shifts in the Russian and US economies are driven by the same set of factors. [The] analysis elaborates on the model of alternative theories of the increased wage skill premium and then evaluates three main hypotheses: skill-biased technological change, the market adjustment hypothesis, and the institutional factor hypothesis. To test these hypotheses, the study uses unique linked employer-employee data that spans the 16 years of the Soviet and transition periods in Russia (1985-2000), with a special emphasis on data quality, measurement errors, and retrospective biases. The main conclusion is that there is no uni-causal and time-invariant explanation for skill-biased changes in wages and employment in the Russian economy. The increased skill wage premium has been driven mainly by institutional factors during the early period and by productivity and technological change during the late transition period, and reinforced by market adjustment of wage ratio to the true differences in labour productivity.
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Authors: Peter, Klara Sabirianova

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2003

Geographic subjects: Europe; Russia

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Outcomes; Technology; Skills and knowledge ... [+] Show more
Employer learning and the returns to schooling

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesised that an employ ... Show more
We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesised that an employee’s education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labour market experience and increase with initially unobserved ability, since the employer gradually obtains better information on the productivity of an employee. Replicating US studies using data from a large German panel data set (GSOEP), we find no evidence for the employer learning hypothesis for Germany. Differentiating blue-collar and white-collar workers and estimating quantile regressions, however, leads to the conclusion that employer learning takes place for blue-collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution. We further show, that information on the productivity of an employee is to a large extend private.
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Authors: Bauer, Thomas K.; Haisken-DeNew, John P.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2000

Geographic subjects: Europe; Germany

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Outcomes; Income; Research ... [+] Show more
Disability and skill mismatch

This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Emp ... Show more
This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job satisfaction, the effects being stronger for the work-limited disabled. Giving workers more discretion over how they perform their work would significantly reduce these negative effects.
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Authors: Jones, Melanie K.; Sloane, Peter J.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2009

Geographic subjects: Great Britain; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Disability; Labour market; Employment ... [+] Show more
Will you still need me - when I'm 64?

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empi ... Show more
For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore I present empirical evidence at the firm level on the relationship between age, wage and productivity. In particular I address the potential wage-productivity gap that might occur at higher ages. I conclude that the productivity of older workers indeed decreases with their age. Nevertheless, the decline is limited. Furthermore, I find no evidence of a pay-productivity at higher ages.
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Authors: Ours, Jan C. van

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2009

Geographic subjects: Europe; Netherlands

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Performance; Policy; Employment ... [+] Show more
Differences in wage growth by education level: do less-educated workers gain less from work experience?

This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. Do more educated workers in ... Show more
This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. Do more educated workers invest more than less educated workers in firm specific, sector specific or general human capital? Do they gain more from improved job match? The paper makes both a methodological and a substantive contribution by offering an alternative strategy for separately identifying returns to general experience, sector specific experience, firm tenure, and job match. Our empirical results, based on the Survey of Income and Program Participation, show that overall wage growth is higher for more-educated workers. This reflects higher returns to general experience for college graduates and higher returns to sector experience for high school graduates. Improvements in job match grow monotonically with education.
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Authors: Connolly, Helen; Gottschalk, Peter T.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2006

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Outcomes; Skills and knowledge; Statistics ... [+] Show more
Employee training and wage compression in Britain

We use linked data for 1,460 workplaces and 19,853 employees from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to a ... Show more
We use linked data for 1,460 workplaces and 19,853 employees from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to analyse the incidence and duration of employee training in Britain. We find training to be positively associated with having a recognised vocational qualification and current union membership, whilst being non-white, [a] shorter current job tenure, and part-time or fixed-term employment statuses are all associated with less training. Furthermore, in line with recent non-competitive training models, higher levels of wage compression (measured in absolute or relative terms) are positively related to training.
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Authors: Almeida-Santos, Filipe; Mumford, Karen A.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2004

Geographic subjects: Europe; Great Britain

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Qualifications; Industry; Income ... [+] Show more
Skill-biased technical change in US manufacturing: a general index approach

This article applies recent advances in productivity and efficiency measurement to the evaluation of skill-biased t ... Show more
This article applies recent advances in productivity and efficiency measurement to the evaluation of skill-biased technical change. Using the general index approach we are able to establish an explicit and unconstrained time path for non-neutral technical change between production and non-production labour in US manufacturing industries over the 1959-1996 period. Our findings confirm the prevailing interpretation in the labour economics literature that substantial reductions in the relative share of production labour are attributable to a sustained period of non-neutral technical change. However, we find that skill-biased technical change effects are most evident prior to 1983. This pre-dates the diffusion of personal computer technologies in the workplace and the dramatic wage structure changes associated with the 1980s. In contrast to prevailing alternatives, the general index approach also permits us to explain observed shifts in relative labour demand as a combination of price-induced substitution, non-homothetic output effects and skill-biased technical change responses to a range of proposed elements.
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Authors: Baltagi, Badi H.; Rich, Daniel P.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2003

Geographic subjects: North America; United States

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Skills and knowledge; Technology; Industry ... [+] Show more
'Soft' skills, 'hard' skills, and the black/white earning gap

This paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical investigation into the impact of job skill types on the bla ... Show more
This paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical investigation into the impact of job skill types on the black/white pay differentials. The theoretical analysis derives that the more intensively ‘soft’/’hard’ skills are used in an occupation, the greater/smaller the black/white pay differential is there in that occupation. Moreover, in response to the differential pay gaps across jobs requiring different levels of ‘soft’/’hard’ skills, blacks are more likely to self-select themselves into the jobs that use ‘hard’ skills more intensively, ceteris paribus. Using NLSY [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth] data, we find consistent empirical evidence to our theoretical predictions. Hence, the paper bridges the existing literature on racial pay gaps and cognitive vs. non-cognitive skills by explicitly testing the impact of job skill types on racial pay gaps.
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Authors: Fan, C. Simon; Wei, Xiangdong; Zhang, Junsen

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2005

Geographic subjects: North America; United States

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Skills and knowledge; Statistics; Equity ... [+] Show more
Evaluating an innovative redundancy-retraining project: the Austrian Steel Foundation

This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing ... Show more
This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing - and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatisation and down-sizing of nationalised steel firms have led to large-scale redundancies. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This Foundation acted like an independent training centre, where displaced workers would spend relatively long training periods (sometimes several years), obtaining personality and orientation training, as well as formal education. The last step of the integrative program was placement assistance as well as assistance creating one’s own business. The Foundation was financed by (higher) contributions from unemployment insurance funds, by the previous firms themselves, as well as by a collectively-bargained special tax on the remaining workers in the Steel Firms. Moreover the trainees themselves would have to support the Foundation by depositing their redundancy payments.
In evaluating post-foundation economic performance I use days worked and wage growth. As a control group I take all other displaced workers from the firms who formed the Foundation, using Instrumental Variables to solve the selection problem. The results show considerable wage gains - even for a period of five years after leaving the Foundation - as well as improved employment prospects. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis is performed to assess the long-term success of the Foundation.
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Authors: Winter-Ebmer, Rudolf

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2001

Geographic subjects: Europe; Austria

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Innovation; Industry; Income ... [+] Show more